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Abstract

Research suggests that depressed individuals experience more difficulty disengaging attention from negative information (e.g., Everaert et al., 2012; Joormann & D’Avanzato, 2010; Koster, et al., 2011), although not all studies have reached this conclusion (e.g., Karparova et al., 2005; Wisco et al., 2012). In the present study, differences in attention disengagement were examined in currently, remitted, and never depressed women. Eighty participants completed an attention disengagement task while viewing emotional images. The time taken to shift their gaze away from the image was used as the measure of attention disengagement. For remitted and never depressed women, the disengagement task was completed before and after a sad mood induction (MI). Currently depressed participants were not found to disengage more slowly from negative images than never depressed participants. There was evidence that the sad MI affected disengagement for the remitted depressed participants who were most affected by the sad MI. The implications of these findings are discussed.